Tips: Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful [Programming] Resume

Objective: Obtain a position at IBM
– some idiot applying to Amazon.com

On Stevey’s Blog Rants (Random Whining and Stuff), author Steve Yegge ponders the question: “Why are the resumes of programmers so uniformly awful? And how do we fix them? The resumes, that is.”

Steve knows of what he speaks. Steve is the guy who ported Rails to JavaScript for Google. The hushed silence we non-programmers hear is due to the awe that our encoding brethren have for an accomplishment like this.

The guy is good. But he’s not perfect.

Or that really dumb guy who accidentally listed “work at IBM” as the objective on his Amazon resume. Ha, ha! What a dork!

Oh wait — that was me. D’oh. I sometimes refer to it as my “million dollar typo”. It’s kind of a painful story, especially for my eardrums, since whenever I tell it people predictably point at me and scream with hysterical girly laughter. Dammit.

(Mentioning the wrong company is one of the most common errors I see in resumes – I got one just yesterday. I think Steve would call that a #3.)

Steve has condensed his wisdom and experience into 10 tips that any programmer, firmware engineer, software engineer or web developer can take to heart:

Ten Tips for a (Slightly) Less Awful Resume

Tip #1: Nobody cares about you
Tip #2: Use Plain Text
Tip #3: Check, please
Tip #4: Avoid Weasel Words.
Tip #5: Avoid Wank Words
Tip #6: Don’t be a Certified Loser
Tip #7: Don’t say “expert” unless you really mean it
Tip #8: Don’t tip your hand
Tip #9: Don’t bore us to death
Tip #10: Don’t be a lying scumbag

Go check out the entire article. His advice is good for non-programmers too.

DYHAQFM?